Meet the Scientists Who Just Shared $25 Million in Prize Money for Their Discoveries

The Breakthrough Prize gave away $25 million dollars to more than a thousand scientists on Sunday.

The Prize is the brainchild of Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner. Milner, who also funds research investigating Tabby's Star (of "alien megastructure" fame), brought tech all-stars including Sergey Brin,Mark Zuckerberg, and Anne Wojcicki on board for the prize, which seeks to add a bit of glamour and excitement to the world of scientific prizes. Morgan Freeman hosted this year's awards, televised live on National Geographic and soon to be rebroadcast on Fox.

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The awards acknowledged a wide variety of work. A special $3 million prize went to the LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which confirmed the century-old theory of gravitational waves. (One-third of the money went to the three founders of the LIGO, while the rest will be distributed to the 1,012 scientists who also worked on the project). Compared to the Nobel Prize, which has been criticized for promoting the "bygone romantic era of the myth of the lone genius," the distribution of money is downright progressive.

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Three string theorists were also given a lot of money, with millions going to Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa from Harvard, and Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Polchinski is known for, to quote Nature, "an analysis in 2012 that concluded that either black holes are surrounded by a ring of high-energy particles known as a firewall — a possibility that contradicts the general theory of relativity — or physicists' understanding of quantum theory is wrong." Vafa and Strominger have also completed important work examining the entropy of black holes.

Jean Bourgain at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, scored the Breakthrough Prize in mathematics. He's looked into everything from harmonic analysis to the geometry of Banach spaces.

Five scientists were awarded life science prizes on a wide range of topics. They include

Dr. Huda Zoghbi, a professor of neurology at Baylor College of Medicine, who discovered a mutation to a gene known as SCA1. This mutation causes Spinocerebellar ataxia, which 150,000 people in the US and causes a loss of balance and coordination. Dr. Zoghbi didn't find a cure, but she established a groundwork for treatment where there was none.

Roeland Nusse, professor of developmental biology at Stanford University, who discovered the Wnt gene in 1982 with his academic advisor Harold Varmus. The Wnt gene is part of the carcinogenesis, or the formation of cancer. Wnt signalling pathways, which have also been the subject of Nobel-winning work, are crucial to our understanding of disease.

Stephen J. Elledge, a professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School, was also given the Breakthrough Prize for work related to cancer. His work has analyzed how cells respond to cancer, and he has also focused on the spread of disease.

Harry F. Noller, a biochemist and director of the Center for Molecular Biology of RNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was given the prize for his focus on RNA and its role in protein synthesis. " Some argue," Nature says, "that he missed out on winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry because of the award's limitation to three winners."

Yoshinori Ohsumi, a cell biologist and honorary professor from the Institute of Innovative Research at Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, was given the award in the same vein as Dr. Nusse: in recognition of vital work decades ago. In the 1990s Ohsumi was a pioneer in autophagy, the cellular regeneration process that comes from the Greek term "self-eating." Ohsumi also won the Nobel this year, and will present his lecture to that awards committee later this week.

The Breakthrough Prize also has a Juniors section, honoring teenagers working in scientific fields it streamed that part of its ceremony online, which you can watch below. An edited, one-hour version of the ceremony will air on Fox on December 18.